Pokémon Bank Shuts Down (Soon)

On 13 August, it was confirmed that Pokémon Bank will finally shut down in early 2027. You have until 26 February 2027 to transfer whatever you want before Pokémon Bank finally shuts down for good.

This is technically part "Eat Crow" post - I've been saying this entire time I thought they would try to combine the Bank and Home servers - but I'm honestly still in shock at the whole ordeal.

I'm not saying The Pokémon Company is rich enough where they could just keep Bank open forever, but I feel like the problem could have been avoided had the two been one server all along. It's not like they were two separate systems that never communicate; one was literally made with the intention that you would transfer from Bank.

What We Are About to Lose

Pokémon Bank's primary use is as a storage device for Pokémon. You would gain access to 100 boxes of 30 Pokémon just like the in-game PC, and you could put any Pokémon from the compatible games (Transfer from Gen 1 Virtual Console, Transfer from Gen 5, Both Ways from Gen 6, and Both Ways from Gen 7). And... that was it.

I never really used Bank much for organizing Pokémon, I used it more to transfer Pokémon around and keep them in games, so I don't have as much to say in my eulogy for Bank as a tool. But it's still a tool I used somewhat regularly these past few years that will be gone forever.

Seven generations of Pokémon games just gone in a snap.

Wait, make that six. Now that we have FireRed and LeafGreen on the Switch and will likely get Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald soon too. Maybe with any luck we get ports of the rest and everything I'm about to say is half-redundant (not whole).

In a technical sense, we kinda already lost Pokémon Bank, didn't we? With the closure of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, the only way you could download Bank if you didn't already have it downloaded would be to use a modded 3DS and install it through other means. I supposed it's not quite fair to say we're losing it now and now is the problem. Those of us who already had it are good to go, but those of us who had a million convenient excuses, such as not being into Pokémon in the year 2024, or being born after this point and getting into Pokémon later in life, missed out. You should have tried harder, I guess. Get good, two-year-olds.

Playing Earlier Games

Seriously, though. The older titles still exist, so this isn't a case of media preservation losing out (yet), but it's still a shame that there's significantly less incentive to go back and play these older games unless these games are ported to more current systems. You could go and do a playthrough of Pokémon Platinum if your heart desires, but don't get too attached to your team because if they're not moved over by 26 February, they're trapped. Forever.

One could make the argument that porting these games would completely remove this problem. I guess it does in a very literal sense, but I'm not sure it's fair to go "Oh, just buy it again and stop whining about it." You're telling people who spent at minimum money on seven games (if they only bought a single copy of each generation, no remakes allowed) to spend money on those seven games again if they want to play them and get attached to their Pokémon.

This is similar to my problem with Nuzlocke Designs: Pokémon games are designed for you to get attached to your team. Even your first Pokémon gets a significant amount of attention as your first, your partner. It's hard not to get attached to Pokémon. If you're the type of person who compartmentalizes and never wants to look over records with nostalgia, then you lucked out. Not everyone is built like that, and Pokémon has that attribute intrisically attached to it.

You could just leave the Pokémon in the cartridge, of course, keep it safe in there the entire time, but now you can't ever play the game again without wiping your save or using unofficial programs to move the save around (we'll get to that at the end, don't worry). Enjoy the roadblock stopping you from playing a game you purchased: Either don't play it or actively destroy something you spent hours on achieving.

Collecting

I am a collector just as much as I am a player. My Collection pages have been taken down for bug fixing (I think a week before the Bank announcement was when I pulled the plug?), but I've been fairly open about that. If Neocities didn't want to be a pain in my rear end, I would have images from 3DS games of me shiny hunting on this blog too (and if Neocities decides not to be a pain in my rear again then I should have a Sneasler v. Shiny Pheromosa to the right). (Nope. It did not. Thanks, Neocities. I'm glad the .png file down here isn't an allowed file type but the thumbnail at the top is.) I know I'm not the only Pokémon collector in the world that this impacts.

I'm lucky in the sense that I only care about Shiny Pokémon and Rare Event Pokémon. It sucks that I won't be able to go back and shiny hunt in these games (and I love RNG manipulation shiny hunting in my... six?... copies of Gen 3), but most of those Pokémon are in significantly easier to shiny hunt games in the future and the rest can be RNG manipulation hunted in future games too.

Key Word: "Most." Here are Pokémon who still can't be shiny hunted easily in present games that can be hunted in earlier games:

• Shiny Mew [JP Emerald – This will almost certainly change if we do get Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald Virutal Consoles]
• Shiny Celebi [Soft Reset, JP Crystal/Crystal Virtual Console]
• Shiny Jirachi [Pokémon Colisseum]
• Shiny Shaymin [Gen 4 Event]
• Shiny Darkrai [Gen 4 Event]
• Type: Null & Silvalley [Soft Reset in Gen 7]
• 3-Piece Dudunsparce [RNG Manip, Gen 4]

Note: Any Pokémon on this list that received shiny event distributions still count for this list. You cannot receive the Jirachi and Deoxys encounter events in BDSP legitimately anymore, which is a completely different issue for game preservation but not the current issue.

But anyone who cares about other types of collecting are signifcantly worse off than I am. Ribbon masters, for example, are about to lose access to a significant number of ribbons to earn on each Pokémon. Ribbons are tied to specific events in each game. And these specific events that reward ribbons aren't easily farmable events; some of them require beating the game with them. Even if you're an expert with every single game, Pokémon games are quite long compared to their difficulty. Did you know the current world record for Pokémon Black is minutes longer than three hours? And that's with optimal luck and the right Pokémon; even if you don't add the Pokémon you want to ribbon hunt with until the Elite Four, you still have to get to the Elite Four. And that's only one of many activities that reward ribbons; other ribbons include mini-games and triggering special interactions that require an entire mini-playthrough in and of themselves.

Once Pokémon Bank is gone? Poof. You can't go back and earn these ribbons or hunt those Pokémon.

Could This Have Been Avoided?

I'm not going to pretend I'm a software engineer or an executive at The Pokémon Company. I don't know what goes on behind-the-scenes, nor do I want to. All I can do is speculate as a layperson in this regard.

I think the biggest issue that feeds into this is Digital Culture. Transferring Pokémon was weird in earlier games, don't get me wrong (and officially impossible from Gen 2 to Gen 3), but it was still something built around an always-possible feature. Even once Bank shuts down, you will still be able to transfer officially from Gen 1 to Gen 2 and back, as well as from Gen 3 to Gen 4, then Gen 4 to Gen 5. Once the Nintendo 3DS eShop opened up and we could have digital copies of games, TPC had to build a system that worked around this convenience at the time. And, to their credit, their system was a good system. No one really thought about longevity at the time like we do now. Did it suck that it cost money to get Pokémon Bank to do this? Absolutely. Was it less money than buying an entire second console to trade with yourself? Absolutely, even by prices back then. Even if you factor in the subscription model, having a copy of three different games (XY, ORAS, and SuMo/Ultra SuMo) and a second 3DS was certainly a price.

Would TPC do something different if this idea of media preservation was as big then as it was back then? ...No, absolutely not, who do you think has been fighting against media preservation? It's not video game companies going "Create copies of our games for longevity! We want you to own our products! We would never take away a game you purchased then claim you actually purchased a license to play the game!" I mean there's a reason people joke about Nintendo sending assassins after people who mod their games.

By the time they moved over to the Switch, though, I'm not 100% sure I understand creating Pokémon Home instead of just putting Pokémon Bank on both. The only direct profit I can think of is that you needed to subscribe to both to use it so TPC made more money, but this is the same company that later made Pokémon Bank free when the 3DS eShop went down when they could have kept charging a subscription, so they're a bit contradictory on that front.

They could have also just built Pokémon Home to work on the same servers as Bank. That would let them keep multiple subscription models and not have to worry about these types of problems later on, and I'm sure by then they knew the eShop wouldn't last forever.

Ultiamtely, we all knew this was going to come at some point. To pretend it was never a possibility would be naive, especially when they warned us about four years ago about this. I don't think it's fair to say they never would have thought of an alternative, but to act like they couldn't have worked around this problem is rather unfair.

So... Now What?

Officially? Nothing. There are modded programs (Bank-Likes, I call them) that you can use on a modded 3DS and modded Switch 1 to move Pokémon around, but those will create their own cans of worms. Transferring Pokémon around adds special flags that mark them as legitimate, and these programs won't add those special flags natively. We'll usher in a new generation of people going "Uh, actually, that's cheating and I am morally superior over you." And, most notably, no one with power actually cares.

Unofficially, the best you could do is mod your 3DS and add one of these Bank-Likes to your devices. The weird thing about recommending Bank-Likes is that they tend to do more than just simulate what Bank tried to achieve, so it's hard to recommend them as just replacements for Bank without opening up the door to that cheating debate again.

There are a handful of Bank-Likes out there, but I personally use PKSM on my 3DS. It works with any game you can connect to your 3DS, even Virtual Console games (even games you legally transfer from a Base Nintendo DS cartridge or Gameboy Cartridge into a Virtual Console title) and you can even set up a personal server to access this collection on different devices (sorta). As far as features that Bank did not include, it also lets you see your Pokémon's special stats (their IVs, EVs, Trainer Values, etc.) and distribute mystery gift cards just like the DNS exploit in the Gen 4 and 5 games. And, elephant in the room, it also lets you hack in Pokémon directly. They also allegedly work with Switch games, but I haven't tried that myself.

The good thing about Bank-Likes is that these are built directly on the console. Unless your console is broken, nobody can take these Bank-Likes and their collections away. The bad thing is that these don't receive official support for very obvious reasons and don't receive those special flags.

I wouldn't call it a good solution (if your goal is only to store collections like you could on Bank), but it is a solution.

There have been some talks about an accessory that lets you connect 3DS cartridges to the Switch that solely exists for transferring Pokémon. I wouldn't bet any money on that coming out, but I guess it's technically a possibility. Not to mention that this would still exclude people who played digitial (and legal) copies of the 3DS games.

Pokémon Home

This will probably happen to Pokémon Home some day, too. There's no reason to pretend otherwise at this point. My guess is that this will take longer (Bank was the go-to app for two generations, 6 and 7, while Home has been the go-to app for 8 and 9 and is about to be relevant for 10), but that doesn't mean much anymore. Companies are growing less and less consumer friendly because consumers having any rights seems to be a threat to them. Game companies want to have their cake (to sell you games) and eat it too (still own the game regardless of your desires).

Sony is currently dealing with that right now with their "We will only sell digital soon" mandate, something I would have talked about myself if I wasn't working on Rukinations v.4 at the time. I might still write about that at some point, but it won't be as relevant anymore unless they do something really bizarre in the process. Who knows?

Back to Pokémon.

Companies actively benefit from screwing over customers when they can get away with it. Even if they never release a replacement for Pokémon Home, technology does not last forever. Eventually, Pokémon will no longer be a company and Home will have to shut down. That could be in ten years, or that could be in one hundred years. Then we'll be back in this predicament.

I hope that we don't get to that point and TPC surprises us all and does that cartridge converter thing, or just releases a sequel to Home that is hosted by the owner and we never have to worry about it shutting down.

But as it stands, things are looking quite grim.

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